WSJ. Magazine May 2014: The Columnists

WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Obsession

Daniel Boulud

"By nature, chefs are already pretty obsessed people. It takes a lot of perseverance and stamina to be able to become a great chef. If you want to be an Olympic swimmer or champion, you have to obsess about training for something like eight hours a day. Cooking is usually 12 hours a day. Everyone I know who is a chef like me has a devouring passion about being truly creative and attending to perfection all the time. We are fanatic about cleanliness, order, avoiding waste. I can see 20, 40 feet away something wrong in the dining room that no one else has seen: a napkin on the floor or a frame that's a little sideways. We always try to enforce a certain order of functioning, and it quickly becomes an obsession to maintain that. Your ambition drives your obsession and your obsession drives your ambition. I don't know which comes first."

—Boulud is a Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur. His DB Brasserie opens in Las Vegas this month.

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Anna Netrebko

Anna Netrebko

"Obsession is a kind of sick thing, I think. It's not a very positive word for me. The people who are driven by obsession tend to be very sensitive people and very strong in a way, but also weak because they cannot protect themselves. Obsession can really ruin a personality and the person themselves. I guess it's good to experience, but it's even better if you stay away from it. The fact is, if you're really dying to have something, it's usually sort of running away from you. Obsession occurs for me when I fall in love. It's horrible. I hate it. It's like a sickness—you can't do anything, you only think about that one thing. You're waiting for phone calls. It can be beautiful, but I don't like to be weak—I don't like to be under the control of something else. When you are obsessed and in love, you're silly and stupid, and your whole life stops around you. I like being in control—I have too many things to do."

—Netrebko is an opera singer.

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Sebastian Knutsson

Sebastian Knutsson

"When I was a kid, I played 'Tetris' so much I could actually see the patterns in front of my eyes even when I wasn't playing. It was that sort of gaming obsession. Games in particular do have a way of sucking you in, so you don't stop thinking about them. With 'Candy Crush,' there's a continuous loop of positive feedback that keeps bringing the players back: It becomes very challenging and frustrating, but when you get past the hurdles, you get this happy feeling of reinforcement. You feel annoyed when you can't complete it, so you feel elated when you do. People often connect obsession with something negative, but obsession can harness your focus and get you to actually deliver. That's how I try to work, actually—I get slightly obsessed with a new game or project, sit up late at night, get into a flow and just try to ride the wave."

Amy Chua

"Obsessive people tend not to be very good at leading happy, balanced lives, and they're not very fun to be around. They're tormented. But at the same time, obsessions are responsible for so much of human greatness and accomplishment throughout history: Michelangelo, Beethoven, Einstein, Steve Jobs. How many people who have changed history would you describe as 'chill'? What obsession gives people is an almost pathological focus and single-mindedness. But sometimes the success that obsession generates can come at the cost of others. I became a little obsessed with making my two daughters realize their potential with their piano and violin playing. But even now my daughter will say, 'Wow, I can't believe I played the Mendelssohn concerto at 13.' There is satisfaction, a real feeling of joy and fulfillment, in the product of obsession that I think people underestimate."

—Chua is a Yale law professor and the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and co-author of The Triple Package.

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Mario Sorrenti

Mario Sorrenti

"When I shot the Obsession campaign for Calvin Klein in the '90s, I was going out with Kate [Moss], and we were fairly young. We were really in love. All the guards are down when you're with somebody you completely trust, which led to these incredibly intimate photographs. I think Calvin recognized in my photos a sort of darker, deeper mood. I had this raw thing I was trying to achieve with my images. To me, the pictures of Kate were a declaration of love, but other people took them in a different way. I remember we were trying to find a soundtrack for the commercial, and I ended up going into a recording studio and talking about how I felt about Kate and added some hard, ambient sounds. When that was edited together with all the imagery, it did end up feeling a bit obsessive and crazy. But at the time I was just trying to hold on to something very precious."

—Sorrenti is a fashion and art photographer.

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Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

"In the creative process, obsession changes linear time. You become entirely engrossed: Time becomes lost, elastic, and things shift and glide in ways that we don't usually experience in the world. It's not only when you're creating but also when you're experiencing art, like a piece of music you're obsessed with. That's why people become addicted to the creative process. This kind of obsession has nothing to do with anxiety and in many ways is a relief from anxiety. When I start to dream about a piece of art I'm working on, that's when I know I'm in the middle of an interesting process. I've lately become sort of obsessed by Chris Marker's movie La Jetée. It's about a person who's obsessed with an image of his past, and because he's so obsessed, people can use him as a tool for time travel. I love this idea that obsession liberates you from linear time and allows you to become a vehicle for something else."

—Sze is an artist who creates sculptures and site-specific installations.

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